Morgan Maguire is afraid to believe in second chances. The family orchard is failing, her twin brother is being framed for murder, and the sharks are circling. The tough exterior she’s spent years hiding behind is beginning to crumble, just as the man who shattered her heart is back in her life. Gage Kirkland is as compelling and magnetic as ever, and he’s offering the kind of help she may not be able to refuse. But can she trust him?

To finance his troubled son’s therapy, Gage, a former investigator, takes one last job–recovering a stolen Civil War artifact. Unfortunately, it’s in the possession of the woman he left behind, the woman who’s haunted his dreams ever since. The electricity between them still crackles, but unless he helps exonerate her brother and finds a way to confess his true reason for returning, how will he ever recover Morgan’s heart?

Gage didn’t move. Beneath the mercury vapor lamp, his shadow stretched across the ground in front of him like a dark crack in the earth.

“Morgan.” His low baritone sounded distorted and gruff, as if his voice had pushed her name through the thick night air. “It’s Gage.”

“What are you doing here?”

He stepped forward and cupped his hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare. Beneath the light, all he could make out was her silhouette standing on the porch. If her weapon of choice was a loaded gun, and it was pointed at him, he hoped she knew what she was doing.

“I asked you a question,” she said.

“I’m here to beg a favor.”

“Well, that’s easy. The answer is no.”

“Look,” he said. “I get that you don’t want to see me. I understand. But I can’t change the past.”

“Neither can I. Go away.”

“I need—”

“I don’t care what you need. Get back in your car and drive toward the mountain. Or off the mountain. Your choice.

“Not a good time to stop by, huh?”

A long, silent pause. “No, Gage, this isn’t a good time. This is a terrible time. The only thing that could make this time any worse was if I was covered head-to-toe with poison oak and had scarfed down the Fried Clam Special at Maxie’s Diner. I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t talk to anybody.”

Rebecca lives with her husband in the beautiful, misty mountains of East Tennessee, where the people are charming, soulful, and just a little bit crazy. She’s been everything from a tax collector to a stay-at-home mom to a house painter to a professional actress and director. When she’s not churning out sensual romantic mysteries with snappy dialogue and happy endings, she likes to travel, go to the Outer Banks for her ocean fix, watch old movies, hang out at the local pub, and make her day complete by correctly answering the Final Jeopardy! question.